


Two More Miracles To Be A Saint

by bannanachan



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-20
Updated: 2016-07-20
Packaged: 2018-07-25 13:30:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7534588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bannanachan/pseuds/bannanachan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I was strongly considering just titling it "The one where Vriska gets beaten up by zombies and robots."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Two More Miracles To Be A Saint

**Author's Note:**

  * For [odditycollector](https://archiveofourown.org/users/odditycollector/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Sing Me A Story](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1130368) by [odditycollector](https://archiveofourown.org/users/odditycollector/pseuds/odditycollector). 



This whole thing is honestly just so irritating.

Like, really: zombies? That’s really how the world ends? Obviously you knew there were zombies out there, being zombies, doing their zombie thing, but you thought it was kind of under control. Also, you were pretty goddamn sure there were other plans for the world ending. Plans that had come endorsed by your psychic friends and which were totally way cooler than fucking zombies.

You’re waiting now for the daylight to pass, huddled under an outcropping by a cliff. There really aren’t enough caves on this planet. You have spent the last several hours sleepless, poking at your computer every few minutes to see if you’ve miraculously acquired a signal. The last messages you have on your Trollian are from hours ago, all anxious, angry. Some of your friends are waiting for you. Some of your friends are not. Most of them haven’t been online for hours – even longer than you.

You left Spidermom behind yesterday without remorse. It was you or her. Before you left, you made a plan with Terezi. The plan involves you solo stealing a hovercraft from HIC and then using it to rescue her and Nepeta, and is probably impossible. It was also your idea, because you’re a damn idiot when you use your mouth or hands to say words, just in general and especially when you feel you have something to prove.

You go over your strategy in your head again. Break in the back way. Avoid the drones. Get the hovercraft. Get out. It doesn’t take long to go over the strategy, because it isn’t a fucking strategy. It’s impossible to have an actual strategy, impossible to plan at all, because you don’t know what you’re getting into. You don’t know if the facility even has a back way, if it’s staffed by trolls, or drones, or lusii, or nothing. You only know that it exists, and holds a hovercraft, because Feferi messaged you to say so, right as the outbreak was starting. You and Equius are uniquely positioned, the only two out of eleven to be remotely close enough to reach such a facility on foot. But there are as many remaining questions as there are irons in the fire, and honestly, it’s not a good look on you.

Not that you’re backing out. You’re Vriska Serket – you can do anything. And your friends are counting on you. You’re not backing out.

But you’re scared.

The sun has fallen completely behind the horizon. You concede to the knowledge that you should probably get moving while you can, and thank your ancestors for another day spent without encountering the undead, though they’re out at night too now, sometimes. The minute you move out of the shade you are hit with a wave of heat. It’s still incredibly warm outside, but you ignore it. You keep walking without thinking, or at least, thinking as little as possible. Your legs tire, and you do not take a break. You take bites from the ration bar in your pocket and sips from your canteen every once in awhile, conservative, unsure when you’ll find more food or water. The moons pass to the other side of the sky, and you’re starting to freak out, because you can’t let another day go by, you’re already running late and you thought it was close – but then it’s there.

Base Pyxis rises above the horizon in an artificial in a way that makes your skin crawl. The landscape on Alternia is dominated by kids’ hives: awkward, but personal, sprawling or small or lopsided or lumpy, no two alike. The base is a massive black cuboid, utilitarian and intimidating. It’s windowless and more importantly, doorless, as far as you can tell. You circle the base a few times, keeping your distance, but there’s nothing, no sign of any entrance. You swear. How are you supposed to sneak in the back way when there isn’t even a front way?

There’s no cover around it either, not for yards on any side. You’re wasting moonlight looking. Finally, you say a prayer to Mindfang, grab your dice, and run straight up to the side. As you get closer to the building, and no attack comes, you slow. You come right up to the side, and still you see no entrance. You round the corner and find a keypad, set into a shallow recess in the wall, almost unnoticeable against the solid black. Nothing around it resembles a door, but you figure it’s worth a shot. You punch in a few random numbers – nothing. Another few, and it buzzes at you. You scowl, and enter in another couple at random when you realize mid-punch that too many incorrect tries could alert the security system of an intruder. You might already have brought robot hell upon yourself and you just don’t know it yet. Then again, you might be dealing with robot hell any minute now regardless. You weigh your options, decide to fuck it, and roll your dice.

A medium-sized sledgehammer appears mid-air and knocks the keypad into the wall by 2 or 3 inches. As the hammer disappears, a hidden panel a few feet to your right slides away, revealing an entrance to the building. You go forward.

It is too goddamned quiet inside the base, with not even a vague mechanical hum to keep you company. Every squeak of your converse on the floor makes you feel naked and exposed, and you breathe careful, even breaths, trying to keep your heartbeat low. You are in a narrow hallway, the floor solid black as the outside walls, the walls a uniform concrete grey, dim light coming from overhead – you can’t make out the fixtures, the ceilings are too tall, everything is bigger than you and unknown and you can’t stop feeling so, so scared, but you can’t stop moving either.

The first thing you find is a weapons cache. There isn’t a hovercraft in sight, the room too small even to fit one, but you stop anyway, captchaloguing everything that seems like it might be useful in the slightest, anything your friends can use – a staff, a sickle, even a rifle for all the good it’ll do you, your kismesis M.I.A. for two days now. There’s no dice, but that’s fine. You already have the best dice.

You have filled up most of your sylladex with these weapons, littering the floor with 8-balls as you smash your old possessions to smithereens, when you see a shadow fall over your own. You turn, knowing what you will find, knowing by the size of the shadow, but your heart still stops because there’s a drone and it’s feet away from you, it’s here and it’s now and it could probably kill you without even trying and it’s drawing one hulking arm back for a blow. You scramble out of the way just in time but the blow still comes down and the shelf that was just behind you smashes into fragments. The impact dashes you against the wall, a piece of ex-shelf careening into your head and leaving a gash. Blood gets in your hair and stains your glasses. Not allowing yourself to even think, you run through its legs and head down the corridor, unsure which direction you came from or where you’re going. It’s following you, though, moving quickly, quicker than something that big and heavy should be able to move. Down a hall, down another hall, it’s catching up with each second and you don’t stand a chance in this hallway, and there’s a door, on your left, you crash through, it crashes after –

There’s a hovercraft. The room is giant and right in the middle, there’s a hovercraft, a round vessel, black like the exterior of the building but painted all along the side in a pattern of tridents and Feferi’s symbol, the Condesce’s symbol, over and over again in bright pink and gold.

And there are four zombies.

You think fuck and you think this is a stupid way to die and you think sorry, Terezi and then you stop thinking and start moving. You make it only step before the drone catches up, and you don’t have a chance to get out of the way. It brings down one great, clawed hand upon your back and you’re forced to the ground. You tuck and roll so you’re not stuck but something in your chest goes crack and it hurts a lot. You look through your matted, bloody hair and see the drone looming overhead, ready to descend on you once more.

You take an impact from the side and fall again as you remember that the giant robot is not your only enemy here. A feral troll with a ruined body and gaping mouth is on you, atop you, on the floor. You kick it off without much difficulty and are grateful to find that it, unlike the drone, is moving slow. You spring to your feet, taking a look around the room to get your bearings. The zombie you kicked off hit the drone’s chest and has fallen to the floor, which has, at least for this second, stopped the drone moving. There’s another two in the opposite corner of the room, and another one near the middle, halfway between you and the ship. If you move fast enough, you can avoid encountering the two in the back entirely, dodge any further attacks from the drone, and plow through the one in the middle, the only one that’s actually blocking your path.

You dash towards it, and too quickly for you to react, to change your mind, it opens its mouth, it bites down, its teeth on your arm. You panic. But it’s your left arm.

The troll tosses its head, once, twice, three times, each toss pulling, its teeth solid, neck strong. It is sunk into the metal and it is not letting go, each shake felt deep up in your flesh. Each pull goes deeper, feels stronger, until with a terrible sound, a creaking, shrieking, machine sound, it pulls your arm straight off. Equius did not make it to feel, so you don’t feel the bite, the digging in, or the falling apart, the arm disintegrating in its jaws. But you feel the pulling, the tearing, the nerves and muscles and veins and arteries in your stump yanked apart and your blood spurting out all over, and you scream bloody murder, the pain from your previous injuries forgotten in a wave of new, sharp, awful hurt. It hurts, it hurts almost as bad as the initial impact, and your gut turns and your vision goes white around the edges but not yet, not yet, you need to keep moving, you need to get out of here.

The zombie is distracted. The way to the craft is clear. You start moving, fast as you can, a leap, a step, another. About halfway there, you hear a crash and you glance behind you and see that the zombie that bit at you has let go of the arm and is headed back towards you. The two in the back corner, ahead of you and sideways, are moving faster than you thought, they’ve made it under the shadow of the hovercraft, they’re only a couple yards away. You can’t find the one that you kicked in front of the drone.

You can’t find the drone.

You ram right into its chest and stumble back, blood pouring from your nose. This close, it’s perfectly clear that it is two or three times your size, that its hand could reach right around your middle and break what’s left of your exoskeleton without the least bit of effort.

You reach for your dice and you roll them right under its feet. You see them settle and flash, and then there’s a bomb, and then there’s another flash as the bomb goes off.

You are blown back, hot air hitting you like a truck, flames licking your front, skin on your remaining arm peeling back, denim charring and melting into the skin of your thighs. You land in a corner. Your ears are ringing and your vision is cloudy but you can make out the drone – or what’s left of it – smoking in a heap about a yard from the hovercraft, legs melted down, arms and torso blown to red metal bits that scatter on the floor among bits of your own arm. Scattered nearby are three charred zombie corpses. You come to your feet, ignoring pain from your burns, the broken chitin in your chest, your bleeding arm socket and forehead. You can’t move very fast, but you go as fast as you can to the stairs that lead up to the hovercraft’s entrance, you get up two stairs, and the zombie, the last one, comes from behind.

It has you pinned limb for limb, one hand leaning up against the stair where there isn’t a limb for it to pin, and you can’t shake it off. You can’t. You’re facedown on the stairs with it above you and you’re too hurt, your limbs won’t move, you’re trying, but its breath is on your neck and you can’t move and you can’t roll your dice and this is how you’re gonna die, zombie bait, and then you’re gonna roam this godforsaken fucking planet with the rest of the undead until the adults get back here to cleanse it all with fire –

And you think of Terezi.

Get off me. You think, and then louder, so loud you shout it without meaning to: “Get OFF ME!!!” echoing off the walls, the only sound in the silent base, cutting through your still-ringing ears. Get off me, get off me, get off me, get off me, get off me, get off me, get off me, get off me –

And it’s off of you.

You breathe raggedly, remaining still for long seconds, not sure what to do with a reality where you can move again. You pull yourself up and flip around and look at the zombie. It – she? – stares back at you with empty eyes, standing slack before you, frozen in time.

You realize what you have done.

“Move your arms.” You bark, voice hoarse.

The zombie girl flaps her arms.

“Nod.”

She nods, continuing to move her arms as she does.

“Stop.”

She stops.

You stumble the rest of the way to your feet. Deep inside you, a familiar feeling creeps up your throat, sending a new rush of energy into your exhausted body. Victory.

“Follow me!” You say, and turn on your heel, limping your way up the stairs to the hovercraft door. It opens when you get close, and there’s a moving walkway set into a slim hallway. You step on and it takes you to another door that slides open automatically at your approach to reveal a medium sized room with chairs stationed before computer terminals. You sit down at the front one, the motion making you woozy. It’s the pilot’s seat, you assume. You’ve never been on a ship before.

A whoosh from the automatic door indicates your zombie has arrived inside as well. Her eyes hone in on you. Controlling her is rapidly becoming a subconscious effort, which is good because your conscious mind is working pretty hard right now just keeping your body awake and moving. You press some buttons on the control panel and then throw a lever, and miraculously, the craft wakes up. There’s a roaring sound, and a video screen opens before you, showing the room you were just in. The ceiling is pulling back, and the stairs you took to enter the hovercraft are retracting into its belly.

You punch more buttons and a map of Alternia pops up, your current location pinpointed with a red dot. Nepeta’s cave is two continents from where you are, and at least eight hours. You could go now and only be a little bit late. But you don’t think you can stay awake for the next eight hours, and you are pretty sure that the instant you fall asleep your zombie is going to wake back up and eat your brains. You search the map for options, for any hives that you actually know, people who could help you. Equius’s house is too far away, you’ve walked so far, and you don’t even know if he’s there. Kanaya is in the opposite direction of Nepeta and Terezi. Tavros isn’t, but he’s almost definitely dead. There is only one friend on your entire contacts list who is powerful enough for you to be certain he’s alive and whose hive is close enough for you stay conscious for the trip, and the word “friend” is pushing it pretty hard. But you don’t have a choice.

You punch in the coordinates for the hive, do something that you think will turn on autopilot, lie back in the chair, and try to keep your eye open while the adrenaline of victory is slowly overwhelmed by your injuries.

***

You realize you have fallen asleep when you wake up.

You panic and try to jump to your feet, but you can’t move – not because you’re tired, though you are, but because you can’t. You feel a flicker of electricity over your hairline and realize that you’re currently bound psiionically to a chair, bands of blue-red static around each ankle, two around your middle, where your arm has been wedged up against your side.

Not far away from where you sit, the zombie is hunched over in a cage of blue and red beams, a cube so small she clearly can’t move, except her mouth – she gnashes her teeth and smack her gums. Her gaze snaps to you when you and even though she’s caged your heart skips a beat. Stop, you think, and she stops, expression going slack, though her eyes remain locked with yours.

There is a noise from one of the walls and you crane your neck to the side to see Sollux standing in the middle of a sliding doorway with his arms crossed. “Huh. Well, fuck me.” He mutters.

“Sollux!” You say, and you’re actually so happy to see his face for a second that you forget that he hates you. “Hi! Holy crap! How are you?”

He holds up a hand. You shut up. He enters the room fully and walks over, cocking his head as he paces before you, examining you. “So, you should be dead.” He states.

“Thanks!” You say brightly. “Why the fuck am I tied to a chair? And where are we going?”

“Jegus, Vriska, I dunno. Why would you be tied to a chair? You only showed up at my door locked in a room alone with a zombie bleeding out and unconscious. And killed my girlfriend, so.”

You jump, looking over yourself for a bite wound. If you were unconscious with that thing –

“You’re not infected. Stop being so jumpy.” He says. “Hell if I know how, but good for you I guess.”

You frown. Vaguely, you can recall arriving at Sollux’s hive. You messaged him telling him to look outside and extended the stairs to the ground, and then you heard the door open, and then everything gets fuzzy. You must have passed out as soon as he arrived, when you felt safe. You feel a pang of guilt at the thought of his psiionics saving your life.

“If I’m not infected, let me go, asshole.”

“You’ll hurt yourself.” He says drily, then as an afterthought, looking at your state, “More.” His gaze drifts to the zombie, who is still staring at you. “The fuck is up with her, by the way? Did she do this to you?”

“Maybe some of it! Now she’s my attack zombie.” You say proudly, and feel less stupid saying it then you expected to. “I’m mind controlling her. I can do that, remember?”

His expression darkens. “Yeah, I remember.”

Whoops. “Yeah, well, point being. As long as I’m awake, I have total control over her. I can make her do anything.”

“Bullshit.”

You roll your eye. “Attack zombie, flip off Sollux.”

She barely has room to move a finger in the cage he’s got her in. But she does.

He whistles. “I stand corrected.”

“You didn’t answer my second question. Where are we going?”

He considers you for a moment before replying. “We’re getting Feferi.” He says finally.

“Right, Feferi! She’s the princess, and this is her ancestor’s ship, we should probably go get her. But hey, could we maybe go get some other people first? I know you didn’t know, so it’s fine, but I’m kind of on a schedule here. Nepeta and Terezi –”

“Are safe in a cave.” He says. “And they have no fucking clue how to treat copious bleeding. Feferi does, and she’s alive, and she’s close.”

“Please, I’m fine.” You say.

“No, I’m pretty sure you’re not.” He says, and nods at the floor. You look down and notice the puddle of still-wet cerulean blood around your feet. It is not small, and your stomach turns at the sight, your head feeling so light you almost pass out again. There are ripples every few seconds as another pulse of blood comes gushing off your shoulder.

Looking at that, you think you might be dead any minute now anyway, so you say it. “And what’s it matter to you? You don’t like me, or need me. Why do you care if I bleed to death?”

“Because we’re running out of trolls.” He says. “And I’ll take a living body over another corpse. Even if that body does belong to a shitty person. So I’m gonna go back to the cockpit, and you’re gonna try not to bleed out for the next ten minutes. I’m keeping that thing caged just fine, so you can let her go if it helps.” He turns around and the door opens. “Good luck.”

He leaves. You breathe. You let your control over attack zombie slip and she starts snapping her jaws again, but it’s better than silence perforated every few moments by dripping blood. It’s something to focus on besides your pain. Besides the thought of Terezi, and how late you are going to be. Besides the implications of Sollux trying to save your life. Besides the end of the world. Just breathing. Just breathing, and bleeding, and living.

You must lose consciousness again, because the next thing you know you wake up. You’re not bound to a chair this time; you’re actually lying down, in a shallow pool of green slime on your back. Your shoulder, and forehead, and chest, and burns, hurt moderately less than they did before. The situation is generally improved.

“Wwell, wwell, wwhat do we have here?”

You take it back.

“Eridan, get out of the way.” Says a dry voice, and Feferi’s head appears in your vision. “How are you f-eeling, Vriska?”

You think about this, moving parts of body bit by bit. “Uh. Pretty shitty, actually.”

“Good!” Feferi says. “That’s a good thing. Probably. Holy carp I’m glad you’re awake! You really scared us there. I wasn’t sure – I mean, you bled a lot.”

You notice Eridan’s face in the corner of your vision and realize he’s just as worried as she is, except that he’s trying to hide it behind a thin veneer of artful loathing. God, you need to break up with him. “Of course I woke up. You idiots would be lost without me. And I’ve had worse. Speaking of which, where’s Terezi?”

Feferi looks confused. “Terezi?”

You hiss through your teeth. “Motherfucker –”

The instant you slip out of the recuperacoon, your wounds start hurting again, but you don’t care. You make your way on instinct to the cockpit, flagged the entire way by Feferi and Eridan, both of them fretful, asking you to lie back down.

The cockpit opens and Sollux is inside in the pilot seat, but he’s not alone: Karkat and Kanaya are in there too, clearly mid-conversation. Kanaya lights up with happiness when she sees you, and then dims when you grab Sollux by his collar and shove him against a wall with your one good arm.

“Why haven’t we gotten Terezi yet, Sollux.” You ask, voice level.

Red and blue lights spark up on either side of you and you are blown against the other side of the cockpit. Karkat rolls out of the way and starts yelling, and Feferi joins in, but you pay no attention.

“We’re on our way to get Terezi, Vriska.” He replies, his voice equally level. “But these two –” and he flicks his head side to side, one set of horns towards Kanaya, the other towards Karkat – “weren’t out of the way, and without you conscious to instruct me on which of our friends’ lives are more worth rescuing than others, I guess I must have fucked it up!”

Your cheeks flush hot with breath and your mind reaches out for something to manipulate, but even this smallest psychic effort makes your vision blurry. Anyway, you should be the bigger person, and you know it. Bigger people let comments like that go.

“I am going to be the bigger person here,” you say, “and let that go! That being said, I’m sure you’re heading straight there now, since I explicitly asked for you to, and you wouldn’t pilot my fucking hovercraft to a different place than the one I asked, at least not twice.”

“Your hovercraft?” He asks. “Seriously?”

“She did find it.” Kanaya chips in, polite as ever.

He gives Kanaya a rotten look, and then turns his gaze back on you. “Actually, AT are CT close by too. And in a lot of danger. And I’m still kind of thinking the less corpses the better. And you’re barely staying conscious right now, so you sure can’t stop me. So I think I’m gonna pilot Feferi’s hovercraft to a different place than the one you asked at least twice.”

You get about halfway across the room, which is not very big, before you are on your knees. For a moment you think it’s more psiionics, and then you notice your vision is going white, and okay, yeah, maybe he’s right about you only barely being conscious. You hold onto that “barely” with all your might and right yourself and look right at him, eye locked on eyes with everyone else in staring at you both. You calculate the odds of your blurry vision and bleeding wounds and dice versus this twiggy psychic kid and a small army of friends who are probably on his side. They do not look good for you.

With no options left, you tell the truth.

“Please. I want to tell her I’m sorry.”

His expression goes funny, sympathy, anger, and pity warring openly for control of his features. He is silent, and so are you.

“Can’t you just save everyone?” Says a voice that is neither of yours, but is Karkat’s, backed up into a corner of the cockpit that is as far from you and Sollux as possible. “Everyone who’s still alive? We’re already mostly here. And you somehow pulled off getting this monstrosity –” He gestures to the hovercraft with an eye roll that could mean disdain or admiration. “So I think you can probably do anything.”

This is extremely base flattery, intended to put you in a better mood to allow this insane fetch quest to go on unopposed. Despite what Karkat apparently thinks, you are immune to these charms. But it is not like him to try at all. And his expression is so pained, so worried, as he says it, and it’s mirrored on the faces of Kanaya and Feferi and Eridan and all of them. And despite what Karkat apparently thinks, you are not immune to that.

“I’m going to go lie down.” You say. You turn around and start to walk back where you came from.

You make it two steps before you black out again.

The next time you wake up, you take a closer look around and realize it’s actually kind of a medical bay, which is reassuring. Next to the recuperacoon, Equius sits where Feferi did before, utterly placid. You wonder if your friends are rotating to take care of you, or just because everyone wants a chance to see you taken down a peg.

“I don’t suppose you kept the arm.” He says.

You smile with your teeth. “You could ask attack zombie if she still has it! But I think it got left behind, and also possibly blown up.”

You sit in silence for a very, very, very long moment. A moment so long, and so awkward, that you are considering passing out again as a viable alternative to enduring it when he speaks again.

“We are only a few minutes away. I just spoke with Nepeta on Trollian. The conversation was cut short, but I believe she is expecting us. Or expecting you, anyway.”

You sit up straight, slime dripping off your hair and onto your back. “Are they –”

“I believe they are both fine. If perhaps somewhat distressed.”

You stretch your one arm, gaze lingering on your left shoulder where the other one used to be. You’ve really only had the right for a long time now, but you wasted no time between losing your fleshy arm and gaining the metal one. Now that it’s gone again, you feel empty, and you’re not sure why.

He notices your looking. “I may still be able to construct you a new one. I have yet to make a comprehensive survey of the technology available on this craft. There has been little time.”

“Thanks.” You say quietly. “I’ll think about it.”

There is another silence for an extended moment. You breathe in wobbly gasps that you decide must be due to your bruised insides even though they are accompanied by gobs of blue liquid that is not blood dripping from your eye.

“Do you think they’ll forgive us?”

He surveys you for a few seconds, then hands you a computer tablet.

“There is only one way to know.”

**Author's Note:**

> A Remix of [Sing Me a Story](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1130368/) by [odditycollector](http://archiveofourown.org/users/odditycollector/pseuds/odditycollector) in which I started out by attempting to explain why Vriska was a day and a half late, got distracted by zombie fights, and managed to pull things together into the end. Thanks to them for writing a great fic to remix, and to [Ota](otomatonom.tumblr.com), [blooper-boy](blooper-boy.tumblr.com), and [Holly](https://www.instagram.com/hollyredwinter/) for beta'ing.
> 
> Title is from "Oh Glory" by Panic! At The Disco.


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